Tony Hayward, the former BP CEO who became a media symbol of the oil giant’s uneven response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, doesn’t regret taking some time off to go yachting.

Earlier this summer, as BP’s Macondo well was spilling what turned out to be 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea, Hayward famously complained that he “wanted his life back” and was pictured on a yacht off the Isle of Wight.

But Hayward told BBC 2 he needed the time off and wouldn’t change a thing.

"I have to confess, at the time I was pretty angry, actually,” he said, according to the BBC account of the interview. “I hadn't seen my son for three months, I was on the boat for six hours. ... I'm not certain I'd do anything different.”

Hayward, in his first interview since leaving as BP’s CEO, admitted he and the company were unprepared for the spotlight.

“BP’s contingency plans were inadequate. We were making it up day to day,” he said.

Hayward defended BP’s overall response to the spill, saying there was no way the company could deal with the media “feeding frenzy” that developed after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig.

“We tried to be open and transparent; we gave access to the operation. But the reality is we were completely overrun and just not prepared to deal with the intensity of the media scrutiny,” he said.

“What was going on was some extraordinary engineering,” he added. "But when it was played out in the full glare of the media as it was, of course it looked like fumbling and incompetence."

Hayward also said he didn’t blame President Barack Obama or other administration officials for public comments blasting the company.

"The emotion and anger and frustration was entirely understandable, actually," Hayward said. "The U.S. administration hadn't created this mess; we had."

As for his public relations skills, Hayward suggested that training from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art would have been useful this summer.

"If I had done a degree at RADA rather than a degree in geology, I may have done better, but I'm not certain it would've changed the outcome," Hayward told the BBC. "But certainly the perception of myself may have been different."

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s commission investigating the spill is meeting this week in Washington for its final public session. Co-chairman William Reilly blasted what he said was “emphatically not a culture of safety” on the Deepwater Horizon rig.

“BP, Halliburton and Transocean are major respected companies operating throughout the Gulf, and the evidence is they are in need of top-to-bottom reform,” Reilly said Tuesday, adding: “We know a safety culture must be led from the top and permeate a company.”